You have it all wrong. The 40-year-old Roe v. Wade court decision is wrong - bad law.

As for the baby, if the heart is beating, it is alive! Isn't it bad to kill it? Or if the baby is not the proper sex, isn't it bad to kill it? Certainly the baby is alive and well at 20 weeks. Isn't it bad to kill it?

What's going on in North Dakota is not whittling away at civil rights or constitutional rights or abortion rights (whatever that is), it is re-establishing the God-given rights of the helpless, unborn baby. At least one state is getting it right!

Walter Sturdivan

Stockton

Without the whole picture and all the facts (not just those that support our position), people think a country can be run like a business or a nation's budget is like a family budget.

The national debt is a whopping $16.6 trillion, and we have been living way beyond our means. However, to convert the incomprehensible figures to numbers we can understand and then proceed to try solve it like a family budget leads to a ridiculously unsolvable problem.

In severe recession and war we have always lived way beyond our means and created overwhelming debt, but we corrected the problem in a way that shows a nation is different from a family. A nation has vast powers, tools and resources no family could possess.

The global economy, technology, increasing longevity and exploding medical costs make 20th century programs unsustainable. Compromise that includes increases of revenue and changes in Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid is the only possible solution. Modest changes such as chained CPI to determine cost-of-living raises have been proposed. I suggest one-third of Social Security be invested in mutual funds creating income and money Congress can't borrow.

H. James Kochi

Stockton

A March 30 column, "Americans must rise up to change politics," suggested the formation of a 'third party' to 'restore our American values and end partisan bickering'.

However, a casual reading of third-party history reveals near zero success for such parties. Our "winner take all" political process is the primary reason a new party would suffer the same fate.

Half of the voters in the last election opted to retain the president and Senate with policies of trillion-dollar deficit spending and total disregard for, not a balanced budget, any budget. Until those policies change or that party loses control, nothing will change.